Amazon.com An online retailer that uses web analytics

Of all of the categories of businesses that exist today, it is almost a no-brainer that online retailers are among the main ones using web analytics as a routine part of their business. After all, the success or fail of that business seems to rely solely on online traffic, clicks, conversions, etc. But a recent survey suggests that a vast majority of e-commerce sites are failing to make the most of their web analytics.

The DBD Media survey, conducted in October 2012, includes responses from 50 e-commerce sites, of which 73 percent are inflating their traffic in their reports, while 67 percent haven’t integrated social media. Some other eye-opening stats from the survey include:

--50 percent of e-commerce businesses track main conversion points

--60 percent of Google Analytics accounts were not correctly synced with Google AdWords

--33 percent of websites with on-site search function do not track site search keywords

--73 percent do not track micro conversion goals such as newsletter signups or account registrations

--30 percent of websites have incorrect e-commerce tracking implementation

As you can see, although the “bread and butter” of many e-commerce sites is traffic and conversions, many of them are not tracking this information at all or not tracking this information properly. To seemingly be the master of all things online, online retailers certainly leave a lot to be desired when it comes to their use of web analytics.

One online retailer that does a pretty good job utilizing web analytics, though, is Amazon. Have you ever been to Amazon.com to shop for a Christmas gift (or any other occasion) and, while reading up on the specifications for a particular item, notice that they also list the top three or four items customers ultimately bought after viewing that particular item, as well as the top items that customers buy in addition to that particular item? This is one of the ways Amazon uses web analytics.

This tactic is part of a much larger strategy – to sell and cross sell through recommendations. Amazon’s recommendation system is based on a number of things: what someone has bought in the past, which items they have in their shopping cart, items they have rated and liked and what other customers have viewed and purchased. All of this analytical data is collected and pushed back out to the customers in the form of a recommendation, which customizes the online shopping experience for each consumer. According to an article on Fortune.com by JP Mangalindan, this tactic seems to work for Amazon, as the company reported a 29 percent sales increase.

Since there are Amazon employees that are responsible for promoting certain purchases, they may think up similar items and make sure that customers who have viewed those items receive an email encouraging them to check out the product the employee is responsible for promoting.  Mangalindan’s article also discusses how web analytics are also used in this scenario. If, for example, a customer qualifies for both an email for book recommendations and video game recommendations, the email with the higher average revenue per mail sent will win out.

This is pretty cool from a consumer perspective, because it prevents my email inbox from being flooded and from a marketing perspective because it maximizes the purchase opportunity, as Amazon’s conversion rate and efficiency of such emails are “very high” – significantly more than on-site recommendations.

Something else Amazon does is optimize the use of its Thank You page. It uses this page as an opportunity to reengage with an already highly engaged visitor. For many retailers, it is easy to assume that as soon as a consumer is finished with their purchase that they will leave the site, so they don’t see a need to reengage. But with Amazon, the Thank You page is a place for them to thank the customer for their order and allow customers to track the status of their order, cancel items from their order, edit the shipping method, see the status of all orders, organize book and music and video purchases in their Media Library. There are also recommendations there, including some based on the purchase that brought the consumer to this page as well as recommendations for items that are frequently bought with the consumer’s recent purchase. Other retailers use the Thank You page as an opportunity to tempt the visitor back into the store, having them sign up for a next-time buy coupon, or have them participate in a survey.

This page is also measured and the analytics can be pretty mind-blowing. I image that by tracking the clicks post-purchase, Amazon determines what percentage of customers leave the site and what percentage of customers do not. And of those that exit the site, Amazon can examine how can they serve those customers better.

In terms of tools, methods and metrics that can also be used to improve Amazon’s overall web analytic efforts, I am not sure what other tactics Amazon can deploy in order to improve. From a consumer’s point of view, every time I visit the site, I am logged in and my recommendations appear on the page. I also receive email recommendations. When I visit other sites, I see advertisements from Amazon for the specific item I was shopping for previously.

When I try to think outside of the box, Amazon has that covered too. They allow competitors to sell on their site but once they see high conversion rates, Amazon begins to sell those products as well, this time at a lower price. Amazon even tracks clicks on its competitors’ advertisements on its site. Pricing and product placement are tweaked to maximize the use of this analytical data.

To reiterate my previous point, many online retailers have begun to use web analytics to better their business, but either there isn’t enough businesses doing it, or there isn’t enough businesses doing it well. Amazon seems to be doing quite well on this front, although there is always new data to collect and new strategies and tactics to deploy.

Goals, Funnels & Filters

Anyone tracking web analytics has thought about how their own visits to the site being tracked are affecting their analytics. For example, a person who visits their own site several times a day to ensure that a page looks the way it is supposed to might be nervous that a bump in the number of visits and pageviews was caused by their own behavior and not authentic interest. Or, a person who is showing a colleague what’s great (or not so great) about their site may be concerned that the click path developed by Google Analytics reflects their own wonky click path that really had no logic or strategy to it.  So what do we do to keep this from happening? Well, enter stage left: goals, funnels and filters.

Goals

First, I want to discuss goals. A goal is a webpage that helps generate conversions for your site. With some extra code, they can even be file downloads or on-page actions. Some examples of goals include a thank you page, a purchase confirmation page, an about us page or a particular news article.  These are helpful because they take the guess work out of determining how many of the visitors that have come to your site converted into actual sales – you can really just track them yourself!

In reading up on goals, I realized something my own blog was missing – an About Me page!  I decided that it would be a good idea for me to add an About Me page where I provide some background information about who I am and what I plan to accomplish with this blog.  Since the purpose of this blog (besides the fact that it was a class assignment) is to write about my experiences with web analytics, there are no ecommerce purchases or any types of call to action that I need to track. But knowing who visited my About Me page will let me know if the visitor wanted to find out more about me or if they were simply interested in the information I wrote about.

To set up my goal, I followed some simple instructions I found here. I then decided that a proper goal would be three pages/screens per visit. This is because ideally, I would want visitors to get to my page because they Googled a specific topic covered by one of my blog posts. Once they get there and read that post, it would be my hope that they would be intrigued by what they read so much that they would want to know who I am and read my About Me page.  After learning of my credentials, I’d love it they it if they would read at least one other blog post before exiting my site.

What’s great about Google Analytics is that you can assign a monetary value to the conversion. This could help executives determine how much revenue their site is earning for them. However, my site is not revenue-producing so I did not select this option.

I got to verify my goal and found that my conversion rate (based on data from the past seven days) would be 16.67%. Because a goal is sometimes tough but not unattainable, that pretty much confirmed for me that this goal was a good one for now.

Funnels

Next, I’d like to chat a bit about funnels.  A funnel represents the path you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages allows you to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go.  Being that my goal is three pages/screens per visit, it would be helpful for me to know where my About Me page fits into the equation, as well as which pages and screens are usually viewed before dropping off. Perhaps these pages/screens are so great that the visitor finds what he or she needs before leaving or maybe they’re so bad that the visitor leaves because they think the site won’t provide them with the information they are looking for.

In looking at my current Visitor Flow, I see that of my 14 visits, 11 dropped off. Of the three that stayed on, two went to visit my post about the comparison between Facebook ads and Google AdWords. All three that stayed on ended up going to my post about Content versus Conversation.  From there, one dropped off. If I had a revenue-producing website, I might consider adding advertisements to the content versus conversation page since most people end up on that page. Since I just added my About Me page, I will need to give it some time to analyze where that page falls into the visitor path before I begin determining what tweaks I need to make in order to reach my goal.

Filters

Lastly, I’d like to discuss filters.  Filters are applied to the information coming into your account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide accurate reports. Google Analytics has three predefined filters. One excludes traffic from a specific domain, such as an ISP or company network.  Another excludes clicks from certain sources, i.e. single IP address, and the last includes only information on a particular subdirectory (for example, www.example.com/motorcycles).

After seeing that my two visits to my own blog were recorded in the Google Analytics information that I wrote about last week, I decided that it would definitely be a good idea for me to block my own IP address. I mean, I visit my site at least once a day, and multiple times any day that I am making tweaks, so it would be unfair to assume that 10 out of 10 visitors were 10 different people when in fact, all or most of them were me. I followed the instructions as outlined by Brad Hogan in his blog and began blocking my own IP address immediately.

I used to manage the content of the corporate site of the company I used to work for. I know that site was visited and used frequently by employees and internal staff. If I were still managing that site, I would definitely block traffic from the company’s entire network. I would also report on traffic from that particular subdomain, though, so I can analyze the company’s own behavior and how the employees interact with that site.

Google Analytics for the Alexis Majied website

Google Analytics is pretty much the analytics tool for everyone – from the person who is just starting to examine web data to the expert who’s been doing it for awhile. And it’s no wonder.  So much information is available to report on, all for free.

I recently added GA to this website. After having it on this site for almost two weeks, I believe now would be a great time to take a look at what information and insights GA can offer me.

Immediately upon arriving at the GA homepage, there is a dashboard that offers analytical information at a glance. At the top, there’s an overview on the number of visitors that have come to my site. A graph is used to display the number of visitors according to hour, day, week or month. From the day view, I see that I had one visitor on Nov. 12, two visitors on Nov. 17 and one visitor on Nov. 23. Beneath that, I see a breakdown of data regarding my visitors’ visits. I see that, although there seemed to be four visitors, that there were actually three. One person visited twice. The four visits resulted in a total of seven pageviews, an average of 1.75 pages per visit, an average visit duration of 12 seconds and a 75 percent bounce rate.

At the very bottom of the page, there are three categories: demographics, system and mobile. For my set of analytics, there was no data to view for system or mobile. As for graphics, I was able to learn that 100 percent of my visitors spoke English and were located in the United States. I also learned that two visits originated from Blue Springs, one from Norfolk and one from Morgantown. 

This dashboard is helpful because it tells you virtually everything you need to know about your visitors at a glance. Of course, if you want to know more, you can certainly start digging. As did I…

On the left side of the page, there are several reports to click on that allow you to delve deeper into your audience. The first is Audience. This report is the exact same report that appears on the dashboard. Demographics and Interests reports are also available. Although I have not enabled these features, I plan to do so in the future. Demographics breaks down your audience by age and gender and Interests tells you what hobbies your visitors are interested in.  The information compiled in these reports will be useful, especially from a marketing standpoint, because of the following reasons as outlined by Google themselves:

·         They allow you to better understand who your visitors are

·         You can segment data by these same  characteristics so you can understand the differences between your converting and non-converting visitors

·         These are the same demographic and interest categories used to target ads on the Google Display Network, so you can use these insights to refine campaign strategies

Also under the Audience category is a report called “Mobile.”  This report tells you what devices your visitors are using to visit your site. For my site, all four visits were from a desktop computer. This report is important because if more of my visitors were using a mobile device, that might be a red flag for me to look into some responsive design or to build a mobile site to accommodate those visitors.

The last report under Audience that I find useful is “Visitors Flow.” This report provides a snapshot of a visitor’s every move while on my site from the time they arrived until the time they exited. One visitor, who has had two separate visits, started off at my homepage, then navigated to the page entitled, “Google Adwords vs Facebook Ads” and then to the page entitled, “Which is king: Content vs Conversation” where they finally dropped off. This is helpful because it provides insight into what my visitors are looking for on my site and, quite possibly, what they’re not looking for on my site. I can make tweaks to my site based on this information in an effort to optimize each visitor’s visit to my site.

The Acquisition section is pretty useful as well. The “All Traffic” page tells you where your traffic originated. For me, one person arrived via referral from blogger.com. Another person arrived by typing in my URL directly and the last person arrived by a referral from some other unspecified location. This information is helpful because it helps me understand how people arrive at my site. If my site was listed on some other website, I would want to know under what pretenses my site is listed and ensure that the information about my site is accurate and representing me and my brand in the best possible way.

But I see the Acquisition section being especially important when and if I ever launch an advertising campaign. This section describes the number of visits, percentage of new visits, number of new visits, the bounce rate, the number of pages viewed per visit, the average visit duration, the percentage of the goal conversion rate achieved, percent of goal completions and the goal value in a dollar amount. This pretty much tells you if your campaign is a success. It also provides insight on the keywords you use and breaks them down by paid and organic search keywords. I like this because if I ever began a search engine optimization or marketing campaign, I can see how well my keywords are or are not performing.

I think Google Analytics is a great tool. I compared the findings of GA and compared them to those of blogger.com’s and I feel Google’s analytical data is more reliable. For example, blogger.com is reporting that I have had 171 pageviews since my site began, but shows no visits to my site on Nov. 12, Nov. 17 or Nov. 23. It is showing that the visitors I had on other days were mostly referred by a site called vampirestat.com, a domain appraisal service.

Based on the information provided by GA, I truly believe this tool would help me optimize my site for better visitor totals and campaign performance.

Google AdWords vs Facebook Ads

When brands are exploring online advertising, they may become overwhelmed with the number of choices available to them.  There’s search engine marketing, social marketing, banner ads and so much more. Deciding which option is the best for them can be a pretty daunting task.

With an average of 5.1 billion Google searches per day and 85 percent of consumers searching for local businesses using Google, it’s almost a no-brainer for a business to start with the world’s largest search engine.  To get started with Google AdWords, a business determines its daily budget,  or essentially the number of clicks they are willing to pay for each day.  Then, the business creates its own ad, which typically includes a title, a two-line description and a link to the business’s website.

The next step is to pick keywords, or the words and phrases relevant to their business. These keywords are important, as they are what prompt the business’s ad to display next to relevant searches on Google. Finally, the billing method is selected. 

Google AdWords is beneficial because there is no minimum budget. Therefore, a business can spend as little or as much as they’d like. Google also makes it easy for a business to reach its target audience, no matter how big or small. They also provide quick and easy access to campaign results. Google allows businesses to make changes to their campaigns at any time, making it a very flexible option. Learn more about Google AdWords by clicking here.

Facebook is another great option, as it has 1.19 billion monthly active users from all walks of life. The process of setting up a Facebook ad is similar to Google, as the business can create its own ad, which also includes a title, description and URL.  Then the business determines who they reach with their campaign. After a daily budget is determined, the process is complete.

However, in comparing the two methods, Facebook seems to have more campaign options.  Notably, Facebook allows businesses to include a photo with its ad or advertise something that they have on Facebook.  In terms of targeting, Facebook seems to help businesses narrow down its audience by providing more filters. For example, businesses can filter by country, age, sex, interests, relationship status, languages, education and more, all while keeping track of how many users you have the potential to reach along the way. Facebook allows the business to choose whether it would like to pay by the number of clicks on the ad or number of impressions. Scheduling is another Facebook feature, as businesses can choose if they want their ad to show all day or just certain times throughout the day. Campaign results are also available at any time. Learn more about Facebook advertising by clicking here.

Lawrence Wang offered in a recent article that while Google AdWords is the industry dominator, with a global online ad revenue of $43 billion compared to Facebook’s $4.28 billion, Facebook has wonderful potential. In addition to its impressive reach capabilities, their ads are cheaper and the return is better – for every $1 spent on Google AdWords, $2 is returned, compared to Facebook’s $3. 

Which is King? Content vs Conversation

Back when everyone began migrating to social networks, brands swiftly followed by building pages of their own and communicating with their current and prospective customers.  With the majority of consumers having one social networking profile or another, it just made perfect sense for brand to follow. But it’s like a field of dreams – just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.  So the question quickly arose – what are we doing on here? What is the best strategy to make this work for us? 

Almost immediately, experts began to tout, “Content is king.” In his article entitled “Content is king of social marketing,” Michael Greenberg makes two distinct points. First, social marketing efforts need to be driven by content; that without it, there is not a whole lot to talk about.  That’s pretty much why people would want to follow or “Like” a brand page. I mean, they’re not one of our friends, so they’re not posting pictures of themselves, sharing recipes we might be interested in or keeping us updated on things going on in their lives. So they pretty much have to keep our attention somehow, and content is the way to do it.

Greenberg’s second point is, given that you have content, cadence is king. Once you make a content promise, you really have to keep it or you will lose that following you worked so hard to get. He gives the great example of BusinessWeek and how its readers would be in an uproar should they just decide to skip a week.

But Catherine Novak offers a different perspective. In her article entitled, “Why conversation, not content, is king,” she gives credit to Cory Doctorow who originally coined the phrase. She goes on to explain how conversation is indicative of consumer engagement and that content is just something to talk about. How true is this when the success of every post, photo and/or video is basically dependent on the number of Likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.?  She goes on to explain that content without conversation is just broadcasting, or advertising. Once it hits the consumer, it just stops there, and they may act on it someday.

I tend to agree with the latter argument. Content was king prior to 2009 when Facebook added the Like button. Back then, people scrolled through their timelines with the purpose of simply reading other people’s posts. But when that Like button came, social networking took on a whole new meaning. Now, there are hundreds of cute kids holding signs asking for Likes. There are photos of soldiers and law enforcement officers asking for Likes. Businesses use number of Likes as a key performance indicator for both their social network pages and posts. That’s because the number of Likes determines the virility of a post, and therefore will tell you how engaging that post was.   

That’s just Facebook. Think about Twitter and how the number of retweets determines the performance of a particular tweet, or Instagram and YouTube with the number of Likes. Factor in the number of shares and you can clearly see that conversation is king now, and that content is just something to talk about. 

Pinterest sees value in web analytics

For the past few weeks, I have been using Pinterest to help me plan special events with friends and family. First, a friend of mine was relocating to Georgia and another friend and I were having lunch with her to bid her farewell.  We wanted to make this lunch special. Of course, we could have given her a Target gift card to help her buy things to spruce up her new place or buy her a picture frame with a photo of the three of us in it. But we wanted to be unconventional, creative. So the two of us took to Pinterest and pretty much used it the way we would use Google – we typed in “going away gift ideas” and lots of results popped up.

Our friend ended up getting two things from me thanks to Pinterest: a cup filled with Starbursts at the bottom and Blow Pops at the top and a straw bearing a sign that said “You Suck” in large letters and “for leaving us” in small letters and a seven-day pill box filled with M&Ms, Skittles, Starbursts and small pieces of folded paper with a memory the three of us shared written on it for each day. My friend got her several gifts, all either wrapped up or enclosed in an envelope, with a label on them saying, “Open when you’re…” The blank was filled with different occasions, such as bored, tired, need a snack, etc. It was truly the gift that kept on giving.

I also have been using Pinterest to come up with different ideas for my gender reveal dinner that took place in October and my baby shower that will take place in January.  So many great ideas were inspired by Pinterest, truly making each event unique and unconventional.  In some instances, I even visited the site that the photo came from to see if I could get further inspiration or detailed instructions on how to make the idea work.

But little did I know that doing so was being recorded as part of Pinterest’s new set of analytics that shed light on how images shared on the site resonate with users.  Earlier this year, Pinterest began allowing accounts track how many people have pinned content from their website, how many people have visited their sites from Pinterest and how many Pinterest impressions their content has generated. It will also show a selection of the most recent pins captured from their site and the content that’s been re-pinned and clicked on the most within Pinterest.

These analytics are especially important to marketers because they give them a window into consumers’ preferences. For example, a particular retailer may benefit from knowing that blue is the most popular color of a style of shirt, or that red is the most popular color of a style of shoe. Contests and promotions can also be executed on Pinterest to increase the number of shares certain products receive. In my situation, bloggers could benefit from knowing which DIY projects and crafts resonate most with people. 

Facebook: Analytics show the site is less favorable among teens

I remember being in my senior year of college. Graduation was swiftly approaching and so many questions remained: What’s next? Am I going to grad school? Will I be able to get a job? How am I going to pay my student loans?  With all that pressure, I also wondered how and if I was going to be able to stay in touch with all of my friends and classmates.  I mean, we were all going to go our separate ways; some of us back to our hometowns and others of us will start lives that no longer include study groups and the occasional campus party. 

I began to collect phone numbers and email addresses but the reality was that I was not likely to reach out to them on a regular basis and when I did, it was quite possible that those phone numbers and email addresses will have changed.  That was until someone asked me the question that would put all of these worries to rest:  “Are you on Facebook?”

“No… what’s that?” I responded.  While the two of us were in the library putting the finishing touches on a term paper, my friend told me to visit the site and check it out.  So I did. After spending my remaining time in the library on the site, I was hooked; so hooked that I jumped on the site again when I got home.  Since that day in 2005, Facebook has become a major part of my life. It has enabled me to keep in contact with friends and family, no matter where they are geographically. It has enabled me to share milestones in my life and reconnect with old buddies.

But a lot has changed since then. Other social media sites have emerged, becoming attractive to various demographics. Facebook began as a site exclusively for college students. High school students wanted in on the action, so Facebook expanded its exclusivity to this group.  Eventually, though, folks of all ages came to see the value in Facebook and made it a part of their lives as well.

Facebook recently revealed that analytics indicate decreased use of the social network by younger teens. I guess that’s what happened – Facebook was no longer exclusive. Not only that, teens began to notice their parents creating Facebook pages, almost by default making it not as cool as it once was.

Analytics have not only revealed that Facebook’s popularity among this demographic is deteriorating, but that Twitter is the “most important” social network to them. Analytics also show that Instagram and other lesser-known networks have double-digit increases year over year.

These analytics are important because they help brands guide their marketing and advertising decisions. They also help the networks themselves make site enhancements to better accommodate their most popular demographics or make enhancements to attract other demographics as well. Whatever they decide, it’s important for marketers not to abandon what will continue to be the biggest thing for what is projected to become the next biggest thing. Although Twitter seems to be the next biggest thing, Facebook continues to be the biggest thing, as in 2017, it is projected that 95 percent of internet users ages 12-24 will still be using Facebook, while at that time, only about one-quarter of internet users ages 12 to 17 and less than 35% of internet users ages 18 to 24 will be using Twitter.